Stephen Baxter - Flood

From there, however, from the Black Sea, the rising ocean water had nowhere to go-not for now. An anticipated change in this situation was the primary motive for this expedition.

Another alarm chimed on Gary’s laptop. Time for him to go to work himself. He began to unreel the instrument chain, dropping it into the water; it would trail the boat’s starboard flank, thus staying well away from the screws.

Sanjay inspected the instrument reel. It was a cable of chain links, with more than a hundred thermometers attached along its length. “For measuring the temperature variations across the thermocline?”

“You got it. The Bosporus has to be one of the most intensely studied waterways in the world. And yet so much has changed, we know scarcely anything about its condition now. Every time you make a measurement it’s a discovery… So where have you come from?”

“Australia.”

“How are they faring there?”

Sanjay shrugged, his expression hidden by his face mask. “The sea is covering the coasts, of course. The inhabitants of the great cities, especially on the east coast from Melbourne up to Brisbane, are fleeing inland. Tent cities on the Great Dividing Range. But the most interesting event has been the sea’s forcing its way inland from the southeast, up the Spencer and SaintVincent gulfs. The Murray River Basin is pretty much drowned, and the sea has broken through to a lake, called Lake Eyre, which was actually below the old sea level.”

“So Australia has had its own refilling episode.”

“Refugees from Bondi Beach tried to surf the incoming waves. Fools.” Sanjay laughed. “Elsewhere it is as you would expect. Dry places become dryer, wet places wetter. To a first approximation agriculture has ended in Australia. Now they rely entirely on imported food, such as they can get, and the rationing is ferocious. But the native Australians have gone.”

“The Aborigines? What do you mean, gone?”

“They always remembered how to live in the continent’s red heart. Now they are leaving the white folk to their drowning cities.”

Gary put the question that every climatologist kept asking. “And if the sea keeps rising?”

Sanjay shrugged again. “Then the Aborigines are fucked. But so are we all, in the end.”

The ship had reached the narrows between the steep bluffs of Kandilli and Kanlica, which still stood high above the water.

Gary asked, “So what keeps you going, Sanj? How are your family? Your kids?”

“They and their mothers are with my sister, Narinder, and her own family. They are in a village in the Scottish Highlands, not far from Fort William. Safe up there. But they may have to move. After the tsunami the central British government all but collapsed, and is capable of organizing nothing but evacuations and emergency relief. In the highlands the old clans are forming again! Our father left us a family tree he mapped back to before the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie. So we have allegiances.”

“You’re not tempted to join them?”

“Maybe eventually, if things get bad enough. For now the science keeps me occupied. We must continue. What else is there to do?” Sanjay glanced at the sky, which was all but clear of smog. He slipped off his mask and sniffed the air.

Having passed through the strait, the Links tracked the coast of the Black Sea to the eastern shore. She landed close to the border between Russia and Georgia, over a drowned seaside resort called Sochi.

There was no functioning harbor here. Shallow-draft boats had to shuttle the scientists to a kind of pier that had been improvised on a main north-south road called the Kurortny Prospekt. There was nobody to help them disembark save the ship’s crew, and they had to haul their own luggage and equipment. But there were trucks waiting, hired by Woods Hole. Gary wondered how much the fuel had cost the distant bursars of Woods Hole.

Much of the town of Sochi, where it survived above the waterline, seemed abandoned, the shops and bars closed up or burned out, and there were few people about. A Russian girl called Elena Artemova, seconded from the Shirshov Oceanology Institute in Moscow, pointed gloomily to the mountains that loomed over the coast.“Everybody sensible has gone to the high villages,” she said. “And so must we, for the night.”

The trucks took the scientists and their gear up into the mountains to a village called Krasnaya Polyana-once a favorite of President Putin, a leathery, tobacco-chewing driver somberly informed them. The drive was spectacular but somewhat scary, the road snaking along ledges cut into steep mountain gorges. As they climbed Gary could clearly see how the coastal resorts had been flooded, their beaches drowned, and how the ocean had pushed deep into river valleys lined with conifers.

This was the Caucasus, the fat peninsula that stretched across the south of the Russian Federation, bounded by the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the west, and the Caspian Sea to the east. Gary had studied the local topography. It was varied country, with the north dominated by steppe and to the south mountains, until very recently still snow-capped. What was most interesting to the climatologists was that northern band of steppe, stretching from Rostov to Groznyy, much of it a meadow carpeted with wild flowers and rush-filled river valleys. This was the lowest stretch of this neck of land that separated the Black Sea from the landlocked Caspian. And when the rising Black Sea broke its bounds, across the steppe was the way the water would flow.

At Krasnaya Polyana they were taken to what had once apparently been quite a grand dacha, a scatter of single-story buildings under a canopy of spruce. The trucks parked for the night, and the drivers disappeared to their own dwellings in the main village. The scientists explored the dacha, calling to each other. The only tall building was a grand limestone block covered with stucco and peeling paint. The long entrance hall had a decorated ceiling, the images obscured by damp, and iron spiral stairs led to rooms off the upper balconies.

There were staff here, locals, mostly elderly, who spoke no English, and Elena Artemova and other Russian-speakers had to interpret. They seemed disappointed the scientists were so few, and that they would need little space. Elena seemed embarrassed to be drawn into negotiating over fees with an elderly woman.

Sanjay said, “You wonder what use money is to people like this.”

“Just as well this old crone hasn’t figured that out,” Thandie murmured. “While her sons have pissed off to the hills to grow corn and fight over the girls, she’s stayed on, accumulating a stash of rubles against the day things get back to normal. Good plan.”

“Perhaps she has no choice,” Elena said harshly. “Did you think of that?” Aged twenty-eight, she was a gloomy woman, but beautiful. Her face was long, with pale, luminous skin, large eyes, a downturned mouth; she wore her hair pulled back, which emphasized the boniness of her forehead.“Perhaps her sons would not take her to “the hills.” Perhaps she cannot work up there. This is all she has. Each of us is under pressure in a changing world, Thandie Jones. And we don’t all have rich western institutions backing our adventures.”

Thandie snorted. “Don’t give me that, Mother Russia. You’re taking the Woods Hole dollar just like the rest of us.”

“If not for us and the ‘Woods Hole dollar,’” Sanjay said, “this old woman and those who work with her would go hungry. So everybody wins, yes? Let’s leave it like that.”

Neither Thandie nor Elena was satisfied, but they had been rubbing each other up the wrong way since Istanbul. Their ongoing argument, oddly, brought out the stereotypes in both of them, Gary thought, the dour moralistic Russian versus the cut-the-crap American.